Security Verification of Hardware-Enabled Attestation Protocols

Hardware-software security architectures can significantly improve the security provided to computer users. However, the authors are lacking a security verification methodology that can provide design-time verification of the security properties provided by such architectures. While verification of an entire hardware-software security architecture is very difficult today, this paper proposes a methodology for verifying essential aspects of the architecture. They use attestation protocols proposed by different hardware security architectures as examples of such essential aspects. Attestation is an important and interesting new requirement for having trust in a remote computer, e.g., in a cloud computing scenario.